[This is an archive post from my old homepage]

For those who don’t know what Nanopond is: Adam Ierymenko’s Nanopond a minimal (absolutely tiny) artificial life system based on randomly mutating and evolving computer programs that eventually get more and more efficient in copying their program thanks to natural selection. While it does not have as diverse dynamic as Ray’s Tierra but it is more interesting to look at.

See a time-lapse video of evolution in action:

This screensaver is a quick hack of Nanopond that allows it’s use as a Windows screensaver. Does not support passwords or anything fancy but it saves the pond when the saver exits. Delete nanopond.1 in the Windows directory to start over.

The pond size (and the screen resolution) is the standard 640×480, but the pond depth has been set to 64 to minimize the pond state file size (with the default settings it’s around 80 megabytes, now around 20 MB).

Download – Binaries and the source code. Extract nanopond.scr (optimized for Pentium MMX) or nanopond_athlonxp.scr (optimized for AMD Athlon XP) in your Windows directory. You need the SDL libraries.